Professor Weiner earned all of his degrees at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His B.A. is in Russian and Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Russian Literature with a minor in English Literature. He has taught Russian language and literature at Wellesley since 1994. He regularly teaches all levels of Russian and literature courses on Dostoevsky and Nabokov. He also teaches a course called Magic Realism for the Comparative Literature program. Weiner's book, By Authors Possessed: The Demonic Novel in Russia (Northwestern University Press, 1997) examines the way a writer's anxiety over the ethics of his novel writing can come to life within the novel itself in the person of the Devil. Weiner has published articles on a variety of topics; they include a comparison of the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and Robert Lowell, another comparison of the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Alexander Blok, and interpretations of the fiction of Dostoevsky and Nabokov. Lately Weiner has been writing a number of essays on the novels and stories of Vladimir Nabokov, who founded the Russian Department at Wellesley in 1943. The result of this interest will perhaps be a book or series of articles on Nabokov. In 2007 Weiner's interpretation of Nabokov's chess novel, The Defense, came out in a volume in honor of Weiner's own teacher, Alexander Dolinin. Weiner lives with his wife Jenette in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in Mendon, Massachusetts, where he indulges his weakness for carpentry without any restraint at all.